Editorial: UNLV gets boost with new program

Thursday, Sept. 14, 2000 | 10:07 a.m.

It was heartening earlier this year when Las Vegas was designated the first city in North America to be an international asylum for oppressed writers. This was due to the combined efforts of UNLV English professor Richard Wiley, Mandalay Resort Group President Glenn Schaeffer and Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature. But that collaboration was only the beginning.

On Tuesday UNLV announced it was creating a post-graduate creative writing program with the help of a $2 million donation by the Mandalay Resort Group. Soyinka will be the program's chair, which also means UNLV will get its first faculty member who is a Nobel laureate. This program alone won't propel UNLV into the ranks of prestigious universities, but this truly is an exciting development.

archive